Jahnne Pasco-White

Being Here is Everything (What a Pity) was originally painted in situ onto the walls at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, in November 2018. Now Jahnne Pasco-White has removed her painting and reconfigured the original work as a five-piece panel. In Being Here is Everything (What a Pity), she responds to her own experience of pregnancy, birthing and mothering, bringing this into dialogue with the experience of modernist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker. At age 31, Modersohn-Becker died from an embolism just nineteen days after giving birth to her daughter. Her final words were "What a pity".

Pasco-White’s painting practice is informed by her interest in the layers of authorship that are both evidenced and concealed by the artist’s mark-making and the continual processes of decay and renewal.